Unionized UPS Teamsters – 260,000 of them – are set to strike in the
biggest American strike since UPS’s unionized drivers walked out in
1997.
Superficially, the issue is about the company moving to seven-day
delivery, but the issue that’s forcing the strike is the sizable cohort
of union members who are unwilling to accept a two-tier workplace where
established workers get the full protection of the union and younger
hires are given a worse deal. This has been a traditional way that
employers have split, weakened and ultimately killed their workers’
unions – by buying off the long-established employees with better deals
that make the workers who’ll replace them feel that unions have nothing
to offer them, which establishes divisions that can be exploited later
to lay off those higher-paid workers, leaving only the lowest-paid
employees and no union they can use to press for better pay.
It seems like some of UPS’s Teamsters have figured out that solidarity pays.
Yo, if they do strike, don’t listen to the media bitching about those workers being uppity or what the fuck ever. Transit and shipping is a increasingly huge industry in the US, and the Teamsters should be cheered on and congratulated for demanding solidarity and support for junior workers–formal union members or not.
If you’re waiting longer on Amazon packages or whatever, of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t complain–but frame your complaints to aim at UPS management for failing to treat its workers well and negotiate, not at the workers themselves. In this Second Gilded Age, that’s the only way we’re ever going to see any kind of improvement from the exploitation of the nation by the uber-wealthy–and UPS certainly qualifies.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 